ISS tracking with Goto mount

[Tim]

That's the best I've seen to be fair. Going to have another go tonight myself if it clears again. Not using my own scope at the moment though so will have to see what turns out

[peter shah]

very impressive...something ive always wanted to do

 

[Stub Mandrel]

Tracking anything within a mount's slew rate capabilities should not really involve anything more than some medium-weight maths. Converting the orbit to co-ordinates is the hard bit, but nothing more complex than Stellarium uses to predict the paths of satellites.

There even an online calculator in Javascript. Anything that can generate positions only needs an add-on to convert these to pointing commands for the mount.

Ha! There's a page on stack exchange with links to the required information:

http://space.stackexchange.com/questions/4211/calculate-satellite-coordinates-from-tle-data

Why not suggest satellite ISS tracking as a free ad-in for Stellarium?

[Physopto]

One day I will have a go at it when moved to a less light polluted site.

[Tim]

I sometimes take a look on Stellarium to see what is passing overhead, how fast and for how long etc, then upload the TLE data to my mount and just track the object for fun.